Encountering Traditions, a book series inaugurated at Stanford Press by Emily Jane Cohen in 2010, explores and reveals the dynamism of encounters that occur between and within religious traditions when tradition comes into contact with other ideologies—whether secular or faith-based. Below series board members Nicholas Adams, Jonathan Tran, and Rumee Ahmed answer questions about the series, its relevance, and their future hopes for this milieu of scholarship.

Reading takes time. Its passing often leaves traces—in marginal scribbles, in typed outlines, in proud commentaries on collected works. Reading, no matter how cumulative, occupies different times. A reader moves through texts in segments of bodily life. Reading falls among other episodes—accomplishments, boredoms, traumas. It calls on other readings already done or set aside.

I began to read books by Foucault more than thirty-five years ago. I started to record my reading of Foucault on a warm Cambridge Saturday in June 2011 and finished that recording about two years later in San Francisco. The traces would have been different if I had recorded them over another interval. Before writing down this record of a reading, I “came out” as a gay man, fell away from Christian community, and returned to it. I spent most sunsets of a July watching fog over Kite Hill in San Francisco. I held men as they died from the “complications” of the unnamable virus that killed Foucault. I lived beyond the age at which he died.

How John Brown's legacy disrupted the state's monopoly on legitimate violence.

by TED SMITH

An 1856 daguerrotype of John Brown (Public Domain).

John Brown tested America. As the Irish poet William Allingham saw, the abolitionist who waged holy war against slavery was like a touchstone: a dense, opaque surface against which the metal of the nation could be rubbed to reveal its true composition.

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Americans have pressed the questions of the day against the hard memory of John Brown in every decade since his execution in 1859. Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Malcolm X all called upon memories of Brown to talk about slavery and its legacies in the United States. But Brown has also been used as a touchstone for other questions. Early in the twentieth century Eugene V. Debs made the case for socialism by calling for a “John Brown of wage slavery.” At mid-century C. Vann Woodward painted Brown as an extremist and used his image to criticize Cold War fanatics on every side. In the 1970s the Weather Underground named their journal Osawatomie to evoke memories of the place where Brown directed the killing of pro-slavery settlers in Kansas. Twenty years later Timothy McVeigh appealed to Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry as a precedent for his attack on the Murrah Federal Building. Christopher Hitchens, Barbara Ehrenreich, and a host of others have recalled Brown’s story in efforts to think through terrorist violence in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Most recently, Cornel West called upon Brown’s legacy to resist the security apparatus that has emerged in response to those attacks:

Brother Edward Snowden is the John Brown of the national security state. He's the canary in the mine. http://t.co/yVOqdnFMbP

“In this day and age, to be religious is to be intellectually dishon­est.” It was with this declaration that one of the best-known, most interna­tionally renowned German philosophers began his opening statement at a panel discussion on religion a few years ago, for which I had been selected as his co-debater. A poor basis for mutual understanding, I thought to myself, since it is surely one of the elementary preconditions for civilized dialogue that we refrain from immediately impugning our opposite num­ber’s honesty. But it was nothing personal. It is just that many people now­adays regard religious faith as so clearly outdated—its cognitive claims refuted by the sciences, the reality of its experiential dimension explained by psychology and neuroscience, and its social functions clearly under­stood—that they are unable to grasp how rational individuals can possi­bly be prepared to sacrifice their intellects in this way. There must, they presume, be interests at play, a lack of intellectual honesty, psychological problems, or simply a lack of intellectual consistency.

When Emily Jane Cohen joined Stanford University Press over eight years ago, there was virtually no focus in the publishing program on religion. There was no dedicated editor acquiring in religious studies, and where religious topics and the press’s publishing program did elide, the titles were rolled under the imprimatur of other lists, into philosophy, history or Jewish Studies.

Without a dedicated focus on this widely encompassing field, Cohen felt something was lacking from the press’s résumé of publications. Having focused on early Christianity as an undergraduate and having begun her graduate career as a medievalist studying apocryphal saints, Cohen believes theology and religious studies offer invaluable inroads into understanding the complicated fabric of human cultures—both past and present.

In particular, Americans as a group, Cohen points out, espouse higher levels of belief and religious participation than equivalent cultures in the West. That belief expresses itself in myriad guises from televangelism to orthodoxy to multifarious new ageism. Delving into the composition and modus operandi of beliefs, faiths, traditions, and related ideologies, unlocks avenues for understanding that are perhaps richer than other pathways, because such studies tap into mindsets that are at once deeply personal and eminently political.

The world's largest gathering of scholars interested in the study of religion will convene in San Diego this weekend at the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting. Exhibit attendees can find Stanford Press at booth 319 and early arrivers can join us and author Ted Smith on Friday night at the Cat-Eye Club for a Poltical Theology Party (clearly, the best kind of party). To tide you over until then, this week the Stanford Press blog presents a lineup of pieces spotlighting SUP editors and authors integral to the press's publishing program in religious studies.

In early-twentieth-century New York City, as elsewhere in the United States, immigrant communities of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews and Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews settled in the same neighborhoods. Many Yiddish-speaking immigrants had their first chance to meet Sephardim under these circumstances. Although young Sephardi and Ashkenazi immigrants often met on the street, in schools, and in the workplace, they spoke different languages, had different cultural mores and religious rites, and even pronounced Hebrew differently. As a result many Ashkenazim, who formed the vast majority of Jews in the country, had difficulties believing that their Sephardi neighbors were in fact Jews. Frustrated by their Ashkenazi coreligionists’ refusal to recognize them as Jewish, more than one Sephardi man reported being driven to desperation and contemplating offering proof of his Jewishness to incredulous peers by demonstrating that he was circumcised. The following source, written in the form of an advice-seeking letter, a genre that first appeared in New York in the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts of Abraham Cahan (1860–1951) during this period, describes the various tactics Sephardi immigrants employed to try to gain the recognition and acceptance of their coreligionists.

To the editor of La Bos del Pueblo:

I am a Jewish girl born in Russia who came to America eight years ago. Although I am not remarkably well-educated, I have always wanted to marry a well-educated boy of the Jewish faith.

One of my girlfriends took me to the Oriental ball organized by La Bos del Pueblo, where I met a boy named Jack. . . .

Inspired by the relative scarcity of information and understanding about Sephardi culture, Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein sought to collect, study, and translate a diverse array of sources by and about Sephardi Jews into a single documentary history. Combining the fruits of their own research with the findings of dozens of colleagues, they compiled over 150 sources originally written in 15 languages and spanning a period of two-and-a-half centuries. Their recently-published volume, Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History 1700-1950, is the result of this undertaking. In light of its publication, we wanted to ask them a few questions about what it was like to work on a project of this scope.

Q:

Sephardi Lives collates hundreds of years worth of primary source material written by or about Sephardi people—what motivated you to bring these texts together?

JULIA PHILLIPS COHEN: A number of years ago, not long after I had first begun teaching, a student in one of my classes approached me at the end of one of our sessions to thank me for assigning so many original, historical documents. I’d never had a student put it this way: she explained that she was grateful to have access to sources crafted by the historical subjects we were studying rather than simply getting scholars’ interpretations of the same sources. Ever since that time I’ve considered primary sources a pedagogical exercise in empowerment—one that allows students to do the work that historians do, including reading between the lines, contextualizing a source, and making links between documents.

Not long after this, some six years ago now, Sarah and I began to discuss the possibility of putting together a documentary history of the modern Sephardi world. The need for such a volume was quite evident to us.

Some six years ago, we began a collaboration with little idea that it would last so long, or yield such rich fruit. Our collaboration was motivated by a single realization: the bulk of sources by and about the Jewish communities we had dedicated our lives to studying remained inaccessible, to specialists, students and lay readers. Most had never been translated into English, republished (in the case of published works), or (in the case of archival sources) published in any form.

Our goal was to amass a corpus of sources that reflected Sephardi history in all its diversity.

The communities in question were modern Sephardi Jews—descendants of Jews who fled medieval Iberia (modern-day Spain and Portugal) following their expulsion in 1492 and settled in the western portions of the Ottoman Empire, including the Balkans, Anatolia, and Palestine. For over four-and-a-half centuries these communities continued to speak and write in their own Judeo-Spanish language, Ladino, an Ibero-Romance language grammatically similar to fifteenth-century Castilian Spanish but encompassing loan words from other Romance languages as well as from Hebrew, Aramaic, and other languages that Sephardim encountered in their new homes, such as Turkish, Greek, and South Slavic languages.

Author Beth Baron describes how one of today's most notorious and polarizing organizations first came to be.

Q:

You describe the Muslim Brotherhood as emerging from a battle “for the bodies and souls of Egypt’s children”—can you elaborate on that? What motivated the formation of this group?

A:

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded by Hasan al-Banna in 1928 as an Islamic reform organization to combat British colonialism and Westernization as well as the inroads of missionaries. American and other missionaries had started a network of social welfare institutions—hospitals, clinics, schools, and orphanages—as sites where they could spread the message of the gospel. Orphanages became particularly contentious sites, for missionaries had discovered that children who were not under parental care were relatively easy targets for conversion.

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The SUP blog showcases new books and Press news in addition to serving as a forum for our authors—past and present—to expound on issues related to their scholarship. Views expressed by guest contributors to the blog do not necessarily represent those of Stanford University or Stanford University Press, and all guest contributions are denoted by a byline and an author bio.